Our guest… Hunter Maats Introduction from The Bryan Callen Podcast. Dave Goldberg works on issues in theoretical cosmology. He also writes books that make physics accessible to the general public including the subject of today’s interview: The Universe in the Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality. In this interview, Professor Goldberg (or Dave) explains some of the ideas covered inside the book and discusses why the sort of physics he’s talking about matters so much. His first book (co-written with Jeff Blomquist) is A User’s Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty. You can follow him on twitter at @askaphysicist. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes. Also, you can find the show on Stitcher.

A physicist speeds across space, time and everything in between showing that our elegant universe—from the Higgs boson to antimatter to the most massive group of galaxies—is shaped by hidden symmetries that have driven all our recent discoveries about the universe and all the ones to come.

Why is the sky dark at night? Is it possible to build a shrink-ray gun? If there is antimatter, can there be antipeople? Why are past, present, and future our only options? Are time and space like a butterfly's wings?

No one but Dave Goldberg, the coolest nerd physicist on the planet, could give a hyper drive tour of the universe like this one. Not only does he answer the questions your stoner friends came up with in college, but he also reveals the most profound discoveries of physics with infectious, Carl Sagan–like enthusiasm and accessibility.

Goldberg’s narrative is populated with giants from the history of physics, and the biggest turns out to be an unsung genius and Nazi holocaust escapee named Emmy Noether—the other Einstein. She was unrecognized, even unpaid, throughout most of her career simply because she was a woman. Nevertheless, her theorem relating conservation laws to symmetries is widely regarded to be as important as Einstein’s notion of the speed of light. Einstein himself said she was “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.”

Symmetry is the unsung great idea behind all the big physics of the last one hundred years—and what lies ahead. In this book, Goldberg makes mindbending science not just comprehensible but gripping. Fasten your seat belt.

ABOUT

-LIBERATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT, GET NAKED, FIND A MOUNTAIN TOP, HIT PLAY, SQUEEGEE YOUR THIRD EYE AND PREPARE TO BLAST OFF INTO THE GREAT UNKNOWN WOMB OF THE UNIVERSE AND ENJOY!

Background

For the past 17 years I've made my career out of designing and teaching group fitness kickboxing classes. Many of my classes consist of up to 100 people, who range in fitness levels from beginner to advanced-- all in the same class. Obviously this exposed some challenges and hurdles that I needed to overcome in order to keep my classes at the highest quality possible. Using my classes as my "laboratory", I've successfully implemented a series of techniques that I use to motivate my clients to achieve their fitness goals. It is my belief that health and fitness is far more mental than physical, and by unlocking certain aspects of the mind in a group setting, I've seen some absolutely amazing transformations! Now, over 10,000 classes later, my passion has turned to researching and studying human psychology and how it relates to motivation, learning, willpower, and self-improvement. Each guest featured on my podcast has impacted me at some point in my quest for understanding, and I hope that by bringing all these masters together, we can benefit from the collective knowledge and make the world a better place to live.